Today the increase in world population, has resulted in increased demand for food, especially protein products of animal origin (Caicedo et al., 2011). Therefore, the livestock industry has implemented the use of growth-promoting compounds, in order to improve feed efficiency, achieve better daily weight gain, which gives result in increased production and reduced costs. Among the most commonly used promoters are growth hormone implants and β-adrenergic agonists compounds (BAA) (Eng, 2000).
The BAA are analogs of catecholamines hormones, and are known for their action to increase muscle accretion, and decrease fat synthesis (Pringle et al., 1993). Currently, these compounds are widely used to promote growth in cattle and pigs (Strydom et al., 2009) due to greater weight gain and feed efficiency is obtained, thus achieving a reduction in production costs.
However, the impact of animal production BAA has taken two ways, one is the benefits they have in animal production and procurement of more lean meat; but there are also risks of poisoning by eating meat and offal of animals supplemented with BAA prohibited, in addition to producing more meat texture and a darker color (Avendaño et al., 2006).
Ferulic acid (FA), is a phenolic compound that is part of the cell wall in plants, whose content varies according to the species. This phenolic compound has been extracted from rice bran and corn, wheat bran and beet pulp (Mattila and Hellström, 2007), and has shown to have a high potential for use in the food industry because of their bioactive properties (Child-Medina, Carvajal-Millan, Gardea-Bejar, Rascon-Chu, & Marquez-Escalante, s/f). The food industry has implemented as an antioxidant agent, achieving retard oxidation of lipids (Nirmal and Benjakul, 2009).
AF, in addition to its antioxidant and antimicrobial capacity, it is attributed growth promoting effect because it has a similar chemical structure to commercial BAA used in livestock (Sanchez et al, 2011; Serna, 2012). Recently, an in vitro study with bovine satellite cells showed that AF is recognized by β receptors on the cell membrane and showed similar levels of mRNA abundance of commercial BAA zilpaterol hydrochloride (Platt et al., 2012).
Sanchez et al. (2011) were supplemented with 50 ppm of AF swine confinement, and observed a decrease in back fat thickness over the control group. In another study, Serna (2012) tested the dietary supplementation of 6 ppm of AF in cattle over the last 30 and 60 days of feedlot phase and compared against a commercial BAA and a control group, and noted that meat from cattle supplemented for 30 days lipid oxidation slowed and kept the red color of the meat for a longer time compared to the control.
Furthermore, this meat was softer than the BAA group. However, in the productive performance of the animals is not a promoting effect as significant growth as that obtained with the commercial BAA was reflected.
The ethyl ferulate (FE), AF ester, and etanol, may be obtained by chemical or enzymatic catalysis (Zhang, 1998; Li, 1999). Meanwhile, Masuda et al. (2006) and Ergün et al. (2011) have reported that ethyl ferulate has antibacterial and antioxidant capacity very similar to those of ferulic acid. Similarly, most chemical into fatty media, affinity supports their integration in a wide variety of foods. These considerations make a good choice for FE used as an antioxidant and promoter of growth from animal production.
Therefore, this invention has as main objective to evaluate the effect of supplementation with low doses (5 ppm) and high doses (10 ppm) of ethyl ferulate (FE) on productive performance and meat quality in cattle producers of meat.